The Chatbot That’s Helping Patients Save Money

DENVER, CO – There are several ways to understand your healthcare spending. You can study the bills you receive from your insurance company. You can talk to an HR representative at work. You can even research the topic online. But each of these methods can be time-consuming and may not lead to the desired result.

“We help individuals understand how much they spend on healthcare so they can save themselves and their employers money,” said Kevin Krauth, Orderly Health’s CEO. “We do this by aggregating different sources of data and enabling users to ask Orderly questions about their healthcare costs and spending habits.”

What’s the account balance on my HSA? Where’s the closest dentist that’s covered by my plan? What’s the best price for an X-ray? With Orderly Health, users can get quick answers to questions like these on their smartphones or computers.

“As Millenials, we’ve come to take for granted that information is available the moment we need it,” explained Krauth. “These days everything is portable, convenient, and on-demand. We’re bringing that same immediacy and transparency to healthcare spending.”

A sample conversation between a user and Orderly Health.

Orderly Health uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze its users’ spending habits and suggest ways for them to save money. Users are able to access this information at anytime by texting or chatting with Orderly Health, which makes use of a conversational interface – popularly known as a chatbot – to respond to their questions.

“The conversational interface allows our users to avoid waiting on hold with their insurance company or getting tied up with an HR representative,” said Krauth. “Orderly Health enables you to take your data with you and interact with it wherever you want, whenever you want.”

Though conversational interfaces have been around for decades, recent advances in natural language processing have led to a boom in their use, with major technology companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook developing chatbots of their own. Orderly Health decided to adopt a conversational interface while a member of Techstars’ Boulder-based accelerator earlier this year.

“We consistently heard that one of the things people hate most is the actual process of accessing their spending data,” said James Dickhoner, the president of Orderly Health. “I remember talking to one person who had spent an hour and a half on hold to get a thirty second answer from their insurance company.”

The realization that users wanted immediate and convenient access to their spending data led Orderly Health to redesign its platform, which had previously featured a dashboard that displayed information on a user’s healthcare costs and spending habits.

“We decided to strip away everything that would be a barrier to the user having access to their data,” continued Dickhoner, “and we realized that the easiest way to do this was to allow our users to ask for their data in their own words.”

The result was the current iteration of Orderly Health, a smart text-messaging platform that helps its users save money by quickly providing them with the information they need to make the best decisions about their healthcare.

“The conversational interface makes the data we have much more powerful,” said Krauth, “because now the user is driving the conversation and getting the answers they need when and where they need them.”

If you would like to find out more about Orderly, and how it could save you or your company money, please contact their team at founders@orderlyhealth.com.